Osama bin Laden has a number of viable ‘role models’ from the history of the Middle East, including Saladin and the Assassins. For example, Saladin (the enormously successful commander during the Crusades) wrote in a letter to the Caliph in Baghdad that “European merchants supply the best weaponry, contributing to their own defeat.” This is similar to Lenin’s famous comment that “the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Now there’s a DoubleQuote!

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Here’s something I hadn’t seen before — a video of Michael speaking at DefCon 9, a couple of years after we met:

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And here’s the .pdf vesion of the course I took with him, first online and then in person — if you read one piece of his, this should be the one: